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Good morning. Business leaders are figuring out how to get the most out of AI. That requires some grasp of the technology, but it’s only the starting point. The real work, from an organizational perspective, is about leadership.
“It’s going to be all about the change management,” Carolina Dybeck Happe, who last year became Microsoft’s first chief operating officer in nearly a decade, said Monday evening at the The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute’s Technology Council Summit in New York. Ninety percent of polled participants at the event agreed.
When Dybeck Happe got the call from Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella to join the company from General Electric, she said she understood the importance of Microsoft proving itself as customer zero when it comes to adopting AI if it wants to have credibility with customers that it is in turn selling AI to. But immediately she knew the challenge would be more people-focused than anything else.
The starting point. Dybeck Happe focused on people and processes before technology, and tapped kaizen, which emerged in post-World War II Japan as a method for rebuilding the nation’s economy and supercharging its steel manufacturing industry. The principle refers to continuous, incremental improvements in efficiency. It has since been employed by companies across the world, from Subaru to Dr Pepper. Read our full story here.
As an example of improving business processes, Dybeck Happe said the tech giant drastically cut down the number of steps required for customer onboarding from 230 to under 40.
That task required alignment from Microsoft’s sales, marketing, product and finance teams, Dybeck Happe said. Then, a further 75% of the onboarding steps were automated with the help of AI agents—the autonomous bots that can perform tasks on behalf of humans.
Admit it. Your process is messy. It begins with a clear-eyed understanding of the process that needs fixing. “A lot of people would tell you what they think the process looks like, what they wish the process looks like,” she said. “But if you understand what it really looks like—and it always gets really messy—then you can say, ‘OK, this is what we’re working with,’ and you get that alignment.”
The WSJLI Technology Council Summit will continue throughout the day. We’re excited to see how this conversation unfolds. Follow the Download for full coverage, and use the links at the end of this email to add your voice to the discussion.
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